From Every Opening Flower

Illustrated by Nicholas Jainschigg

“Everything’s negative, Mike,” Nadine’s husky voice reported from the starship Jacqueline Cochran’s biological analysis station. “They’re just gone—and we can’t tell why from up here. There’s nothing left to do but go down.”

Commander Mike Tanner slapped the arm of his chair in frustration. After a month in orbit, the mystery remained. His screen was filled with the planet—a blue and white, green and brown work of art from here. They’d scoured the abandoned settlement with flying and crawling robots and flown through its buildings and forests in virtual reality. The colony’s starship was still waiting in orbit, fully functional—if they’d gone somewhere else, they’d gone in someone else’s spacecraft.

Mike’s older sister, Dena, had been its chief bioforming engineer, and had been down there when the colony fell silent. Gone. He remembered her, not so much as an executive engineer, but as a pixie-haired adventuress, always taking him to new and different places.

Different. “OK, everyone. I think Nadine’s right. I don’t think another orbit or another week will make much difference. We can go down, or—” he offered silent apologies to Sis and all the people back at Tau Ceti who’d worked on the colony “—we can quarantine the place and go home. Nadine?”

“Mike, you sound paranoid. We didn’t ride that beam six light-years just to turn around and go home. Look, whatever happened, happened long ago. The water, the air, and the dust are fine. Genetic samples of everything matched the file data. There’s no detectable threat now.”

An hour later, the shuttle Yeager settled itself down on pillars of annihilation-heated steam into the crater its exhaust made in the overgrown landing field. Mike’s chair rotated forward until his feet touched the flight deck and he looked down “through” the view-screen-covered hull. It was a brilliant clear day with the hazy disk of Epsilon Eridani high in the soft blue sky.

Dena had loved this world—“It’s going to be a really beautiful place. This is my baby, Mike,” she’d said, and since its discovery 130 standard years earlier, the Mars-sized world had been her only baby. Now, he’d inherited it, as he’d inherited many of her toys, so long ago. A tear formed in the corner of Mike’s eye. He’d come as soon as he could, but after fourteen years, there could be no real hope. The Universe, he mused, was not built to human scale.

“Not too lively, is it?” Ian commented. A tall, graceful Englishman, lately from the Nova Britain subcontinent of Tau Ceti III, Ian was reserved, but highly competent. Now, with dry humor, he chipped away at the tension that had been building for the three months since they’d revived on entering the Epsilon Eridani system. “You’ll be all right, Mike?”

Mike rubbed his eye. “Yeah. Make sure the data gets up to the Cochran.”

Ian nodded. People double-checked robots that double-checked people. “Cochran, Yeager,” Ian called the mother ship. “We re down nominal, Rod.”

“Copy, Yeager,” starship pilot Rodrigo Cruz replied.

Nadine greeted Mike at the airlock with a smile, her large sparkling eyes framed by high Slavic cheekbones. Her hair matched Mike’s, a light, almost golden brown, but in contrast to his functional crew cut, it streamed all the way down to her waspish waist. Her willowy, almost Gothic 185 cm topped him by 3. It was all self-engineered; her original body had lasted only as long as it took her to get her doctorate in postnatal genetic engineering. She liked looking different, and Mike, in the way that opposites attract, liked that in her.

She looked Mike in the eye—down a little, actually—and gave him a hug. “Warm out there, lover,” she said. Her rich, earthy contralto contrasted sharply with her ethereal appearance, by design.

Lover? As the two senior expedition members, they were more comfortable sleeping with each other than with anyone else and, without any stated intention on either of their parts, it had become exclusive. But Mike would not yet admit to love.

Mike handed Nadine a thirty-centimeter-long double tube with a grip, a trigger, and a five-centimeter viewscreen on the rear end, and a magazine of stun darts, comm flares, and microprobes.

“Why guns?” she asked. “There’s nothing down there. Nothing.”

He smiled. “That’s the problem.”

The door hissed up to reveal the cone of an extinct volcano set behind a vista of green. Leaves rustled in the breeze and the smells of the rain forest flowed in over them like a fog of perfume. Other than the geometric boundary of the landing area, there was little hint of human habitation.

Mike wondered how the captain of the first ship to go looking for the Roanoke colony had felt when he came ashore in Virginia, six centuries ago, and found nothing left but ruins.

Mike led the way to the edge of the landing field, scrambling over the rim of the blast crater and on through thick cloverlike plants that squished and slipped beneath their boots. Insects buzzed among brilliant flowers, pursuing their pollination duties. Bird song punctured the silent air—a mourning dove, or its local version, Mike thought. Appropriate. Small critters made occasional scurries.

His sister’s holos had shown her riding horses. Where were the horses? he wondered.

They reached the edge of the field, poked around some overgrown but otherwise intact port structures and gazed through underbrush at the deserted buildings a half-kilometer away. The hour went quickly, and they returned to the hatch. There, Nadine tested their blood and nerve functions.

“No ill effects.” She gave him a look that implied, Let’s get on with it.

Mike frowned, then nodded and called the rest of the team.

There were ten of them, altogether. They walked into the colony on what used to be the main street, pushing away vines and tall grass and sweating with the effort. The lower gravity—less than half that of Tau Ceti III, or Earth—was little help and, in fact, reduced traction. Observation motiles flew silently overhead, covering the area from millimeter wave to ultraviolet and sending the data instantly to the orbiting Cochran.

Once, Mike recalled, the colony had been a carefully tended garden, thoughtfully integrated with its rainforest environment. Now, trees grown twice as big as their ancestors on Earth crowded the sky. Lawns were shoulder-high brush fields, and hills of orange and purple Wendy flowers outlined what had once been walks and curbs. The streets themselves had been overgrown to the point where they were simply paths of lower-height vegetation.

Once in the buildings, they looked by instinct—poking under furniture, prying open doors the robots hadn’t been able to, touching, analyzing, sampling, and speculating. Hours went by, then—

“Mike, Kay Singh, at the Admin building. I just got the data storage room open. It’s been ransacked.” Their astrophysicist was a deliberate, low key, and usually understated woman, so whatever got her excited was likely to be interesting.

“I’ll take the feed,” Mike said.

The picture from Kay’s robot floated in front of Mike. The room was a mess. It had been a typical installation; the central processing units had been five-centimeter cylinders set on an optical shelf a couple of meters long. The shelf had been pulled from the wall and each of the CPUs lay shattered. There were dark—almost black—stains beneath the years of dust on the floor. Nothing moved—which proved nothing, Mike thought.

If they were dealing with something alien, the operative concept was that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic—and being invisible to a robot might be a relatively easy trick.

“Guess we d better take a look personally.”

“I’ll wait for you,” she said.

Mike took his gun from his belt kit. “Stun darts,” he told Nadine. “Better safe…”

Nadine got her own out.

Mike looked at her. “You’re joining me, then?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.” She brushed a caterpillar-like something off her arm. “Yuck. You go find a leaf.”

Mike said, “We’ll need to reestablish plant and insect control here.” The bugs were designed not to bite people—as soon as their primitive little sensors recognized one—but sometimes that required crawling on you. “The jungle seems to be overrunning everything.”

“Yeah.”

They reached the Admin building in minutes. The only two-story structure in the little colony, its wide, debris-covered staircase yawned at them ten meters inside the front door. Some local version of ivy had followed its banister up as far as Mike could see. Nadine took the point without asking, flashing him a daredevil grin, and he smiled back at her. Excitement like this was hard to come by, and she wanted it all. He didn’t blame her.

They stepped through the entrance. The colony and its own eyes were still powerless, but Mike’s visor display told him the ship had activated the tiny cameras all crew members wore—there would be a visual record of anything out of sight of the overheads.

They climbed the stairs to the data management area, a circle built around a tall redwood that must have been one of the first plants started in the area. The hall was a torus around the tree, and the rooms were truncated pie-wedges around that.

“Here,” Kay called to them from a quarter circle around the inner balcony. They came and looked. Broken equipment, furniture, glass, artwork files were scattered around the floor.

“Animals?” Mike wondered out loud.

Kay shook her head. “I don’t think so; the door probably jammed shut when the power failed.”

“Probably. It should be reasonably safe,” Mike said, but he worried. No Earth life would have stayed inside for fourteen years waiting to attack the next thing to come through the door—but the possibilities included crazy robots and aliens.

Kay looked further down the ring. “I have a few more doors to open.”

Mike nodded, “Go ahead. But be careful.”

She nodded and left.

He looked at the room. It was utterly still. Kay’s probe showed everything he couldn’t see himself. Empty. He walked briskly into the middle of the room and turned, gun ready. His feet crunched pieces of plastic and glass on the floor. Nothing jumped him. He scuffed the dust off the floor with his right boot. There were stains beneath the dust.

“Nadine…”

“OK. I see it.” She came in, bent down, and placed her analyzer on one of the stains, brushing away shards of shattered plastic. This stuff is too tough to break from falling, Mike thought.

“Blood,” Nadine announced, standing up from the dark stain. “It almost looks as if they fought a battle with something. Something big and violent that hated computers.”

Mike shivered. Abduction? Sabotage? Insanity? “There’s nothing larger than squirrels and—what did they name them?—wood rats, left on the entire island.”

“You’re the one with a drawn gun.” With a wry grin, Mike pocketed his pistol. No alien attack this time. “Let’s see if there’s anything in the maintenance record. There should be some non-volatile memory left around here.”

He found what was left of the physical data storage rack on the floor. Parts of the pencil-sized broken optical data wands were scattered on the ground. “Whatever did this didn’t want to leave any records.”

But the wall mounted comm unit seemed intact. He pulled off the face plate and looked in its hole—the wand was still in it.

“But they missed one.” Its label glowed as his hand warmed it: “Data management room,” he read aloud. “Not full. It might have a record of what happened here.”

“I’m not sure I want to watch.”

Mike’s incoming call tone sounded. “Tanner,” he said.

“It’s Harrison. We’ve found their graves.”

“Graves?”

“Graves, Mike. Under the orchard. It’s a bloody burial ground! I’ve got the video on four.”

When was the last time, Mike wondered, that he’d heard of a body being buried? People died of accidents every now and then… but usually when there wasn’t enough of a body left to revive, the rest was ceremoniously burned. There were, of course, some sects, back on Earth.

“Opaque, display four,” Mike whispered. Instead of the room, he saw the orchard.

The site was covered by a canopy of fruit trees as wide and tall as oaks in this gravity.

Mike remembered seeing the area in passing on ground probe video—mounds in neat geometrical rows filling the spaces between the trees. He hadn’t thought that the mounds were anything unusual at the time. “It looks like cultivation.”

“Oh, not far off,” Ian said. “Those roots and branches would camouflage the radar image. I saw the survey VR, but it didn’t come through up there. Here, I felt it. Now that I recognize it—it’s obvious.” Ian was originally from Farnham, a town in England in an area still rich with old churches and cemeteries. “We opened two of the graves. They were buried in food preservation bags.”

The video zoomed in on two sacks lying in shallow pits ringed by dirt. The human forms within the sacks were clear. “We let the gas out, so come look if you want.”

The thought that one of those could be Dena sent shivers through Mike. “On our way.”

“Roger, Mike. If you don’t need me, I’ll be down the hill working on a transporter.”

Mike turned to Nadine “Plague?”

“Something biological, probably.” She shook her head. “But why didn’t they tell us? And why, literally, cover it up?”

He looked at the data wand for a moment, then put it in a coverall pocket; they could view it later.

“Yeager, alert everyone to be on the look out for symptoms of… something.” He turned to Nadine. “Let’s go.” They left the building and loped for the hill area. Outside, birds sang, leaves rustled, and brilliant flowers tossed in a gentle breeze.

The orchard reminded Mike of the inside of an empty cathedral. The tree trunks, grown large in the low gravity, stood like columns supporting a speckled green ceiling.

Nadine walked between them, scanning the mounds with a field radar probe. “There’s just enough cover to keep them cool and away from the wood rats, I should think. They get shallower, and less ordered as you go back in, as if whoever was digging them was running out of energy. There are remains in all of them.”

Mike shuddered.

Nadine touched him. “Go down and talk to Ian. I’ll handle—this.”

Mike nodded silently and stumbled down the hill.

Ian was trying to revive one of the colony’s ground vehicles, a flatbed transporter. Tool kits were laid out among the grass and flowers where one would more likely have put picnic baskets. Several of the crew stood nearby trying to act helpful.

But Ian was in his element. He’d worked on projects from the Venus sunshield to the Nova Britain Equilateral Power Station, and seemed to be familiar with almost any technology ever devised.

“If I can just hit the right waveform for this old power receptor,” Ian said. “There! Its little idiot brain is up.” He clapped his hands in satisfaction. “Now all we need to do is provide some energy If you’d be so kind as to hand me the end of that cable, Mike…”

Mike pulled his thoughts away from the bodies. Have to get back into the mission, he told himself. He wasn’t the only one who had lost relatives or friends here. “We have local power?” he asked. The colony had been stone dead, probably since the central computer had been destroyed.

Ian flashed a rare grin. “I wouldn’t want to be using anything from Yeager without your say-so, Commander, would I? Mutera and Silvany have the hydro plant going again, up at the crater.”

Hydro, of course, Mike recalled. Despite the warmth, sunlight was less intense here, and it was often rainy. The ancient caldera four thousand meters above them had been plugged, dammed, and filled with fresh water to serve as the colony reservoir. Dena’s doing, probably—much simpler than a fusion plant, no tritium residue, and it would have appealed to her historical sense.

Ian turned and stared at him. “Look, Commander, we can’t bring Dena back, but we ll make it right for her, won’t we, now?”

Was it that obvious? Mike wondered what the hell his face looked like. He nodded to Ian.

“Mike, the work up there—” Ian gestured toward the orchard hill, “it was done by hand, I’d say—after the equipment shut down. Nadine’s still up there, is she?”

“Yes,” Mike said. “Maybe long enough.”

“Mike?” Nadine called, as if summoned by his thought. He looked up the hill, and she came down toward them, taking the long strides of a human in a hurry on a Mars-class world. But going downhill that way had its risks, and she unceremoniously slipped and tumbled into a muddy creek bed at the base of the hill when she tried to stop. She stood up and shook the mud off her hands in disgust and pulled a hibiscus from her hair.

It might have been funny, but they all had very unfunny things on their minds and no one laughed. Mike and Ian loped over to the bottom of the hill and helped her up.

Nadine tossed her head back toward the hill, sending a wave of dirty hair over her shoulder. “One hundred and twenty-six graves.”

Mike flipped his visor down and gazed skyward for a moment as it displayed the colony data. “There were 127 personnel on Griffith…”

“Quite,” Ian remarked. “So number 127 couldn’t bury him or her self.”

“Assuming the 127th person did die,” Nadine added.

People shifted their feet uncomfortably. A survivor? Or a murderer?

“I know what you’re getting at,” Mike said. “It’s unlikely that only one person would have survived what killed the others—unless he or she was what killed the others. We’ve done a pretty thorough search, but we assumed we were looking for someone who wanted to be found. There’s no way we’d find someone in that jungle who really didn’t want to be found. It’s been fourteen years, I know. But still, he or she might be a bit unbalanced by now, and maybe dangerous.”

“Mike, let me take a good look at the bodies before we assume that,” Nadine said, scraping mud out of her hair. “Ian, can you get some people together? I want those graves exhumed. You’ll need to be careful—the food preservation bags weren’t designed for years of underground use; they could burst—”

Ian held up a hand. “Uh, Mike, I’d rather get some of the robots together for this. They’ll get the job done faster and they won’t be making quite as much stink about the proceedings, if you catch my meaning.”

Mike was unable to suppress a smile at Ian’s black humor. “Good idea.” He turned to Nadine, who would be dealing with the bodies, regardless. “Plague?” he asked her.

“No.” She shuddered. “These people didn’t just get sick and die. I got radar images of some of the skeletons. Broken bones—lots of trauma.”

“A riot? Caused by something psychotropic?”

“Not impossible, but any saboteur would have had to bypass the water or food supply screening equipment. More likely some biological factor.”

“Could a killer—or killers—have been under its influence, too?”

“Either that or the colonists might have gotten crazy the old-fashioned way—on their own. Or there’s something we just don’t understand—something that’s not chemical, not biological, but that somehow gets to the brain through another channel. I’m not getting weird on you. Lights flashing at certain frequencies used to drive some people to convulsions.”

Mike frowned. Mass murder from light flashes? “Suppose someone was reasonably sane but wanted the place alone and was sufficiently ruthless to do it that way. Still, that’s just a different kind of psychosis, isn’t it? Megalomania?”

Nadine smiled. “That might be paranoia—on your part. Who’d want to rule a whole world with no other people in it? He’d be totally isolated, almost half a dozen light-years from company. And I don’t think one person could have done this, sane or otherwise—people would defend themselves, eventually.”

“Maybe they did,” Ian said, “and lost.”

Mike shook his head and looked up at Epsilon Eridani, a smaller disk than Tau Ceti as viewed from his home world and not much larger than Sol viewed from Earth. “I can’t believe a First Contact would come down this way. The handful of people wouldn’t be much of a threat to them—besides, anyone watching us ought to be too far ahead of us to be doing that kind of thing, wouldn’t they?”

Ian nodded, but frowned. “That’s the prevailing theory. On the other hand, there are human beings that torture insects, dogs and cats just for the fun of it. I’ll have the Cochran do a more intense survey of the highlands. Keep an eye open for evidence, just in case.”

“Which brings us back to a possible survivor,” Nadine said, fixing her hair behind her back. “Ouch.” She pulled what looked like a caterpillar from her hair, frowned at it momentarily, and tossed it aside. “I need a shower. This jungle isn’t all nice—he or she may be in trouble.”

“OK,” Mike conceded. “It’s a long shot, but you could be right. He or she may be in trouble, but may just as easily be dangerous—to us. We’ll reallocate some of the robots to guard duty from now on. Yeager,” he spoke to the ship, “notify everyone on the ground net so they don’t get irritated.”

Nadine shook her head and sighed. She thought he was overdoing it, he knew. But he was responsible for everyone. He touched her mud-splat-tered arm. “And please don’t you go off alone either,” he implored. She gave a noncommittal shrug. Constraints on a free spirit were a hard thing—but Mike needed her, and needed to be sure of her.

“Wouldn’t think of it,” she muttered.

Nadine’s tiny lab filled one side of Yeager’s infirmary, and its autodoc and a bunk over it hung like porch swings to stay level under any combination of lift or thrust. Cabinets filled the walls above and below the lab bench, and video screens lined the wall at eye level, above a work surface brightened by a vase of Wendy flowers. Nadine sat on the stool in the center.

Mike watched her work—she was concentrating very hard on something more important than his questions—and he was reluctant to interrupt. Besides, the wait gave him precious time to think.

Even in virtual reality, the autopsies were… grisly… and time-consuming. From the start it was obvious that all 126 had died violently. Gunshot wounds, stabbings, bludgeonings, immolation, and signs of torture marred each corpse. Aliens wouldn’t be using human-style weapons…

“That should do it,” Nadine finally said. “Gunshot wounds. The trajectories indicate the bullets radiated from about here.” She held a hand out in front of her chest as if holding a handgun. “I’d say they were self-inflicted. Mike…” She was trembling. “The subject was a ten-year-old boy.”

He put a hand on her shoulder. “Care to go for a walk?”

She sighed, then turned and smiled at him. “I’d love to.”

With surveillance robots silently winging overhead, they left the ship and trudged up past what they now called “Boot Hill” to a dome of rough lava that stuck out above the trees. There were plumeria and Wendy flowers about and the smell was heavenly.

From the hilltop they could see “Chip,” the ruddy, pockmarked natural satellite of Griffith’s World cut in half by the sea horizon. It looked like a huge flattened half dome, ten times the apparent radius of Luna from Earth and distorted like a wavering mirage by refraction through the thick atmosphere. A synchronous moon, it would never rise or set, but it always seemed to be doing one or the other, bobbing slightly up and down on the planet’s thirty-four hour diurnal cycle.

Nadine started to undo her suit’s fasteners.

“We’re being watched,” Mike reminded her.

“Good,” she said. “I itch all over. Prickly heat. I feel like one big sweaty itch and I want out.” She gave him a grin. “Mike, there’s not a damn thing out here to worry about. It’s gone now.”

He shrugged his shoulders and glanced at the moon on the sea behind her. The environment was, he thought, almost obscenely erotic. The heat, the odors… Leaves rustled; from the wind or an animal, Mike couldn’t tell. Life all around him. “Are you ready to release the autopsy reports?”

She frowned. “No. It’s been slow—eighty bodies to go yet. One really curious thing.”

“Oh?”

“Endorphins. After seventeen years, in the brains of the ones that weren’t burned, evidence of endorphins. Mike, some of these people died happy. Really happy.”

Mike felt a chill—and not from the slight breeze. Think of something else, he told himself. “Crazy moon. Sits there on the horizon like a big tit. Never goes anywhere.”

Nadine grabbed him, released the fasteners of his suit, and began to take it off.

“Hey,” he laughed. Nudity was no problem; the two people who had brought swimsuits along had quietly abandoned them on reaching the planet. But lovemaking, Mike thought, was a little more private, especially if you’re in charge and didn’t want to look ridiculous. What had gotten into Nadine, he wondered? She’d always been the shy one on public displays of affection.

“Nadine, I feel like someone’s watching us.”

“Please. Shut the surveillance off if it bothers you. But please. The bones, the corpses, the heat, all the bones… Mike, I need you.”

He didn’t resist—in fact he cared too much about his best friend and lover to deny her. His coveralls dropped to the rock as her warm sticky body rubbed against him.

Then she pulled him down on her.

“Your back,” he protested. She was lying on the raw lava of the hilltop.

“It’s OK; it needs scratching. If I get a scrape, I can fix it. I’m the doctor, remember.” She giggled. “I want you, lover. Here and now.”

Then her mouth was on his, precluding further argument.

Nadine’s back, indeed, looked like she’d been lashed when they were done, but she didn’t seem to mind even when they dressed. Mike had to insist that they go to the tiny infirmary. People looked at them as they passed and smiled. Was their recreation that obvious, Mike wondered, or was he just imagining it?

At the infirmary, she gave him a clean towel and disinfectant spray.

“No anesthetic?”

“No. I don’t want it. That’s strange, isn’t it? Some people say sex acts as an anesthetic. An endorphin thing. Ah, rub there.”

The lacerations “there” were deep, with grit still in some of them. “Nadine, that’s raw flesh.”

“Do it,” she demanded.

“Monitor,” he said. “Show Dr. Havel her back.”

The clear space on her wall filled with a picture of her devastated skin.

“Look at that, Nadine. I can’t rub that.”

She looked confused. “No, of course you can’t. But—but I want you to. It would feel good.” She got a strangely puzzled look on her face. “Something’s happening to me, Mike. My sense of pain seems to have been changed. I mean, it’s still there—but I like it. Like a good itch, like I want to rake myself with something sharp and pointy.”

Mike felt a tightness in his gut. “Nadine, when did you start feeling like this?”

“That should be my question.” Her eyes said it all. Despite every test and every reasonable precaution, something was happening. “I don’t know. I was hot, it might have been an immunological reaction. But we re all hot.”

“Scary.”

“I know, Mike. Look, maybe it’s psychological. The people here died happy, and maybe somehow—I’m getting in tune with that. Empathetic.” She laughed brittlely. “But, OK, I’ve got to put myself in the autodoc. Get fixed before this, this empathy gets the best of me.”

Mike kissed her briefly and helped her into the coffin-shaped unit.

Before she lay down, she took his hand. “Mike, about Dena. I wish she were still with us, but whatever it was, I think she didn’t suffer. I think I understand that now. I’m going to put mass hysteria, self-abuse, and sadomasochism on the sleep reader while I’m in here, and study up on it. I didn’t think it could do this, but…” Nadine shook her head. “Maybe something in the environment—a combination of things that are individually benign. See you in the morning.”

We’ve seen the face of the enemy, Mike thought as he watched the autodoc lid slide shut. In a few hours the battle would begin.

Hours turned into days. Nadine identified Dena’s charred remains from bone marrow DNA, ending any hope—or fear—Mike had that she, alone, might somehow have survived.

As it became more and more clear how the colony had met its end, the level of tension had risen among the rescuers. People were looking over their shoulders.

Then they found the horses.

Toward the mountain end of the valley were a dozen waterfalls and sheer lava cliffs that rose vertically out of the alluvial plain. At one of those places, there was a slight basin filled with sand. It looked like a jumble of tree limbs on radar, but there were no trees.

Ian explored the site and found some bleached bones sticking out of the black sand. Excavation revealed dozens of horse skeletons, many with their skulls cracked. It was as if they had charged the wall full-tilt and died trying to butt their way out of the valley.

Dinner had been silent that night. No evidence of an alien presence showed up at all.

Back on the bridge, Mike stared at the holographic image of a very concerned-looking Rodrigo Cruz. He wanted to touch the man, and had to remind himself that Rod was some twenty thousand plus kilometers away, at the L4 point of Chip’s orbit.

“We could bring another shuttle down, within range of the Yeager. In an emergency, we fly it out by infrared data link regardless of crew condition.”

“Or,” Mike said, “we could lose both shuttles. No, stay up there for now.”

“Mike…”

“I mean it, Rod. We have no clue as to how this happened, but Nadine may have it. It seems biological, but all the life-forms we’ve found match their gene patterns stored in the colony’s design plan, so we’re baffled. Until we know more, you are to stay in orbit. Even if we start joyfully blowing ourselves to smithereens, stay up there. Because if you don’t, you might take whatever it is back to Tau Ceti, and we damn well can’t have that. Understand?”

Rodrigo Cruz nodded. “Order received. But Mike, if you go crazy, the discretion is mine.”

“Chaos! I know that. But, Rod, if that happens, use your head. Don’t stick my memory with another thirty lives!”

Or another planet, or a starship bound for Earth, or… Mike didn’t want to complete that worst-case thought.

Rod looked down and brushed a shock of jet black hair from his brow. “Order received.”

Mike sighed. “OK. Now put everything into searching for a survivor. The odds are small that we can locate him through the foliage, but it’s our best chance of finding answers. And maybe solutions. Yeager out.”

Silently, he called up a review of the data. It filled the wall—other pieces of the puzzle had come in: the personal effects of the colonists had been left untouched, except here and there where they had apparently been used as weapons of opportunity on each other. Food and water supplies proved to be free of poison, drugs, or biologicals. One maser transmitter had been torched, and the two backups taken out with axes.

Various discharged weapons were found all over the colony—many more than occasional hunting would explain. They had been made locally, by the colony’s nano-replicator. Bullets, arrowheads, and crossbow bolts found in the bodies of some of the colonists matched the weapons.

In the main dormitory, the crew of Yeager had made perhaps their most disturbing discovery. One wall was covered with primitive drawings of stick figures dancing around a fire. One female figure was being carried into the flames by others. The scene was done in what turned out to be human blood. There was another blood painting of a dagger in a human heart, with one word: “Why?”

“Psychotic art?” Mike asked.

Nadine shook her head. “Maybe an effort to communicate the horror of what they were doing, even as they did it. That’s the last of the autopsies.” She gestured to a holographic display over her lab bench. She was hollow-eyed and weary from ten days of intensive effort. “That woman burned to death, leaving charred bones and little else.”

Mike regarded what was left of this body with revulsion. “I don’t know how you keep going,” he told her. “Have you slept at all?”

She flashed a quick, wry smile. “I dope myself down for four hours out of twenty, then dope myself up again. Don’t look at me! Doc Bailey on the Cochran has been working just as hard.” She sighed. “I haven’t been outside for over a week. At least the work keeps my mind off… other things. I heard it rained today,” she said with a weak smile.

“Just a shower. Prettiest rainbows I ever saw. The flowers smell like a dream.”

“I don’t dare dream, Mike. Corpse after corpse. These people deliberately, willfully destroyed their bodies while they were still alive.”

Mike looked at her bleakly, and nodded. She was different, older, harder. It wasn’t just tiredness; she hardly looked like the same person. She… “You’ve cut your hair.”

“I wanted to do something, something really self-abusive. But I didn’t dare do anything really significant. Not while I have all this responsibility. So I just hacked it away—butchered it.” She laughed like a wicked child. “A self-destructive catharsis, and Harrison said he liked it!”

“You hacked pretty evenly, I’d say. Got it kind of tapered.”

“I used the scalpel.” She stared at him.

He pulled her from her chair and put his arms around her.

“Squeeze tighter, lover. It helps a little. Pain helps. I’ve stabbed myself twice, you know. Deliberately. Just for a release. Felt great. Almost like, you know—”

“Nadine!”

She made a hollow laugh. “I took care not to hit anything vital, and I’m taking an endorphin antagonist to dull the response now. But I’m walking a chemical tightrope. Too much and I can’t think, too little and…” She looked into his face with haunted eyes.

He hugged her as hard as he dared.

After a squeeze that hurt his arms, she said, “OK, back to work.” She pointed to a fractured bone in the video. “The left arm—two of those bones had been broken at least a week before she died. She was right-handed.”

“Why didn’t they tell us?” Mike asked, rhetorically more than anything else.

But Nadine answered. “I think they were ashamed.”

“Ashamed?”

“Suppose itching, or maybe sex, became fatal, but we couldn’t stop doing it?” Nadine looked at him. “Sex was really dangerous once, you know. People died in childbirth. Then there was a fatal sexually transmitted virus that fed on the immune system itself. People did it anyway.”

He looked at her, remembering.

She flashed a smile at him. “Have you looked at the data stick we found in the computer room yet?”

Mike shook his head and grimaced. “Damn. I forgot I had it.” He patted his coverall pocket and found it. “Here. Since Ian found the graves it’s been one thing after another.”

Nadine touched his arm gently and motioned to her reader. Mike dropped the wand in the hole.

“Left wall,” Nadine said. “Let’s see the last thirty minutes.”

A monotone holographic image sprung up in front of the clinic wall screen: a half-sized view of the colony’s central data room, then intact, and two occupants walking eerily in front of the screen like ghost images. The maintenance surveillance record was silent—a privacy constraint—and of course, its subjects were now “ghosts.”

Mike froze as their appearance sunk in. They looked like primitive aborigines, naked except for tattered shorts and an unbelievable number of rings and other things piercing their bodies—noses, ears, biceps, lips, everywhere. They were caressing each other with an almost crazy intensity, tearing at their adornments as they did, and blood flowed freely. Mike shot a look at Nadine. Her eyes were wide with horror—or fascination—and oblivious to him. He touched her arm.

She nodded slowly. “In my considered medical opinion, they’re having fun. Maybe too much fun.”

The man fell to the floor, clearly exhausted, and said something. The woman shook her head and kissed him. He spoke again, seeming to plead, and she finally nodded. Suddenly the man flung out his arms and yelled what was clearly: “Now!”

The woman took a knife from somewhere, held it high, then brought it violently down. Nadine stared. Mike turned away.

When he turned back, the woman’s image stood over a mutilated body, the knife still protruding from a mass of gore in the abdominal area. She cried and laughed at once, grinning, almost prancing around the room, raking herself with her nails. She went to the optical interface shelf and, one by one, pulled the CPUs off, threw them on the floor, and began stomping on them. White bone shone through her bloody, shredded feet before she was done with the third one. When she took the fourth, the record went blank. Without regulation, power had shut down. Mercifully.

Mike shook his head, shuddering. “We’ll have the Cochran play back everything. There may be some… clue.”

Nadine shivered, but seemed fascinated as well. “I think she wanted to protect us from knowing. But why is she so happy? Why the endorphins?”

“Madness?”

“That’s the symptom—what’s the cause? Got to be biological,” Nadine whispered. “You don’t want to be cured. You want madness to run its course. That utter destruction gave them an ecstasy literally worth dying for. She wanted to keep us from knowing what—what I’m beginning to feel.”

“Nadine…” Mike put his hands on her shoulders. “I don’t want to lose you.”

She grabbed his hands hard and dug her fingernails into his skin. “Then join me,” she whispered.

“Nadine!”

She sat silent for a minute at least, breathing deeply. Then her eyes shut a moment, and Mike watched as she called up the hologram of the autopsy statistics. In an unsteady voice, fighting for detachment, Nadine started to go over the results. “Thirteen of the bodies were immolated.”

Mike nodded, grimly.

“All women,” Nadine continued. “It matches that ritualistic scene in blood on the dorm wall. I’d guess the women wanted it that way, more tactile, more feeling in our skins. With the guys, it’s deep wounds. Bones with knife scars made during life. Bones shattered by gunshot. I’ll bet a bunch of them just walked up to each other and blazed away at ten paces. They deliberately didn’t shoot to kill; there are too few gunshot wounds here that would be immediately fatal in and of themselves.”

Mike looked a question.

“It might be something very deep, biologically, say a retrovirus that somehow cross-wires some aspect of human nature.” She shivered. “The missing body belongs to Ken Shanks, the chief biologist and genetic engineer. Everyone else is accounted for.”

He shrugged. “If that video is any clue, he probably killed himself, too. Scavengers would have dispersed the remains. Shanks… the name sounds vaguely familiar.”

“It should. His parents knew your sister; they were on the advance team that came to Griffith eleven years before the colonists. They brought him along, and he was already a prodigy—doing graduate-level work in his teens. He’s got to be the key—among all the colonists, he had the best background to protect himself from a retrovirus.”

“Or make one?”

Nadine shuddered. “Maybe, but what an awful thing to make! And there’s no trace of it. Except, maybe, in me. I’ll know tomorrow—they’re going through my blood scan in the Cochran. Time for me to go to sleep, now,” she said abruptly.

“Just remember that what’s happening isn’t you. Your duty is to fight it and keep going—until we can fix it.”

“Sure.”

Ian looked worried. “Thanks for coming, Mike,” It was late evening, more sweltering than usual—the rain was still steaming from hot tarmac and black volcanic rocks. Ian had his coveralls open to his navel and was sweating freely. That was the compromise most of the ground party had made between heat and security.

“No sign of Shanks?” Mike asked.

“That’s why I called you. Sometimes I get the feeling that we’re all being bloody well watched.”

Mike grinned. “Me, too, occasionally. Watched by the ship in orbit. By our surveillance robots. By all the cameras we’ve scattered around.”

Harrison looked up at the sky with mock resignation and back down again. “Quite. Well, what I’m feeling goes a bit beyond all that, I’m afraid… About this time yesterday afternoon, after we finished getting the bodies stacked in the freezer, I went outside—just to breathe fresh air before turning in. You know those trees east of Boot Hill? I could have sworn I saw eyes in the bushes, looking at me. I blinked and it was gone. When I’ve been near the woods I’ve heard twigs crunch. Nothing big enough to crunch twigs left on this island but people, is there?”

Mike nodded. “What do the cameras show?”

“Cameras and overheads can’t bloody see through trees, can they?”

“Someone taking a leak?”

“Skulking in the woods, with the bugs, the mud, and without their comm badge?” Ian gave him a wry grin. “Damn sight more trouble than using the loo would have been.”

“Then?”

Ian shrugged. “We could sidle up to the edge of the wood like we’re looking for something in the clearing, cameras on us, and if he shows again…”

Mike nodded. Once seen and identified, their surveillance system should be able to track whatever Harrison had seen, even if neither of them were able to catch up. “OK. I’ll give it an hour.”

Ian nodded, motioned toward the muddy clearing. “At least it’s stopped raining…”

Epsilon Eridani had finally set behind the central mountain, leaving the sky a still brilliant blue, but the ground deep in shadow. They made a show of getting out their flashlights and scanning the ground while taking quick and furtive looks into the even darker wood.

Mud stuck to their boots. They were nearly overwhelmed by the stink of the ubiquitous rain-soaked Wendy flowers. Mike didn’t expect to see anything in the mud—so it took him a couple of seconds to realize it when his flashlight outlined a bare footprint.

“Chaos!” he finally choked out. “Ian!”

Ian came over and looked at the patch of ground illuminated by Mike’s flash. A complete human footprint, and parts of several others, were preserved in the mud by the base of a tree.

“Who the hell would be going barefoot?” Mike’s tone was casual, but inside he felt something cold and hard forming in his stomach. So it was Shanks, after all. “He’s not wearing shoes and not carrying anything else radar could see through the trees, so he doesn’t show.”

“Well, his bones,” Ian said, his manner matching Mike’s outward calm, and the tension in his voice matching Mike’s inner anxiety. “But among the tree limbs, they wouldn’t register.” Ian looked to where the footprints vanished into the forest. “I’m no tracker…”

Mike nodded. “Me neither. I’ll have Yeager send a couple of surveillance motiles.” Human pattern recognition was better, but the ship would miss less detail. He brushed some orchids out of the way to give his helmet cam a better look. But before he could link to the net, it linked to him.

“Mike, Kay Singh,” the voice said. She was tense, fighting for control. “Alonsis Mutera and Todd Silvany have just killed each other. With knives. The Yeager got it on the surveillance camera, but we didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late. They looked like they were playing, having fun. Then all their blood and… insides… started coming out and we sent a surveillance robot down to trank them—but it was too late.”

“How many people have seen that?”

“Only myself and the duty crew, so far.”

It was Mills’s shift, which meant Roger and Ann as well. Mike felt a sudden hard sting on his wrist. He swatted and pulled a large crushed, wormy thing from his sleeve. “Find Jensen, Kay. Ian’s here and I’ll tell Nadine. No rumors, OK? And if anyone else starts feeling these, these urges, they need to see Nadine immediately.”

“Copy. Kay out.”

Mike turned to Ian. “Mutera and Silvany just killed each other before anyone could do anything.”

Ian looked down and up again. “Nadine will need the bodies, Mike. I’ll tend to it.” Then Ian looked at Mike’s hand—he was still holding the caterpillar. “What’s that?”

“Damn thing bit me…” Mike said. “Yeager, any record of Mutera or Silvany complaining of insect bites? Caterpillar bites, specifically.”

“Everyone on the planet,” the Yeager reported, “but you, reports at least one bite, usually in connection with picking Wendy flowers.”

“A caterpillar?” Ian stared at the oozing corpse. “Not supposed to be making a meal out of us, is it?”

Mike shook his head. “You’re right, Ian. The insects matched their base templates, and engineered insects weren’t supposed to bite people.” Then again, colonies aren’t supposed to disappear either.

“It might be a mutation, or a freak.”

“Yeah, fourteen years and no corrections. Artificial ecologies need a lot of monitoring before they get all the bugs out.” Mike grimaced at his unintended pun.

Ian raised an eyebrow, “So ‘as built’ doesn’t match the plan. Wouldn’t be the first time in engineering, would it? Or do you think it might be deliberate?”

“Sabotage? Back that far?” The pain of the bite faded and he shivered again. Was the bite toxic itself, or just a vector for a retrovirus? “Yeager? Mark me down as bitten. The thing that just bit me looked something like a caterpillar, at least it did before I smashed it.”

“I’ll send a robot over for it,” the ship told him.

“Warn everyone to keep hands and wrists covered, and keep their hands off flowers.” Mike turned to Ian. “If the footprint belongs to Ken Shanks, I think we need to find him. Soon.”

But it was well past noon the next day before they picked up the trail of footprints. Mills and other crew members with experience in hunting and tracking watched through Mike’s camera, asking him to look at this and that—broken twigs and depressions in the dense mat that covered all but the largest lava boulders. Everyone agreed they’d trade a bath and a cool night’s sleep for one good dog. Ian followed Mike, safely out of sight.

After a few minutes of walking, Mike found himself in higher, denser wood. A glimpse of white caught the corner of his eye.

Pinned to the tree with a knife was a note handwritten in large block letters on the back of a ration envelope. Mike carefully scanned his camera around it before freeing it from the tree.

IT’S NOT MY FAULT THEY ALL DIED. I KNOW WHAT DID IT. HOW DOTH THE LITTLE BUSY BEE.’ I’M NEARBY AND I’M WATCHING YOU.

Instinctively, Mike’s head spun left, then right, but he saw nothing. The brush was still too dense—too complicated. A gust of the evening wind ran through the forest, rustling leaves and making boughs creak like a rolling ship. For the second time since he’d arrived on Griffith’s World, Mike felt a chill.

WHOEVER FINDS THIS, IF YOU ARE ALONE AND WANT TO HEAR THE TRUTH, WALK NORTHEAST AND KEEP WALKING. DON’T PICK THE FLOWERS.

—DOCTOR KENNETH SHANKS

“We’ve figured that out, damn you,” Mike muttered to himself. He suppressed the urge to pat the smooth bulge of his hypersonic needle gun, and jammed the knife back in the tree, perhaps harder than necessary—it didn’t really hurt the tree, he felt—for all he knew, the trees here would like it.

He linked his data back to Ian and pressed on through brush, fallen logs, and dead needle-covered black lava boulders that looked like so many skulls.

“Don’t turn around. Got you covered. You—you hear me? You understand me, huh?”

Mike froze. The voice was a man’s, though uncertain, high pitched, and cracked. “OK,” he answered. “What happens now?”

“I’m not go—going to kill you. No. Why should I?”

Mike fantasized about being shot, with needles tearing through his flesh. Chaos. It was happening to him already.

“Take your gun out and toss it far… far away.”

Mike calmly did as he was told. “Dr. Shanks, I presume,” he said with an ironic smile at the historical allusion. “Will you come out now?” Shanks was the key, he was sure of it. But he would have to handle this very carefully.

Shanks walked around from behind him. His hair was matted and fell down to the middle of his back. He was naked, deeply tanned and moved his spare frame in quick little jerks. A full, shaggy beard obscured his face but brought attention to his wild eyes. Those eyes darted around and failed to meet Mike’s. Shanks had been bluffing—he was unarmed.

A vague feeling of disappointment passed through Mike, but his mind snapped to the problem at hand.

“Very well, Dr. Shanks. What’s your story?”

“You read the note?” He gave a kind of crazy laugh. “How doth the little busy bee/improve each shining hour/And gather honey all the day/From every opening flower.’ Do you know it?”

Mike nodded. “It’s from Isaac Watts. My older sister taught it to me when I was a boy after I got stung by a bee.”

“What did it mean to you?” Shanks seemed suddenly very grave, as if this were extremely important.

Mike tried to answer seriously. “Stings are part of life. The bee can drink from the flower with impunity, but if you stick your nose in, you get stung. Pretty doesn’t mean safe? A decoration for us is a job for a bee? It’s poetry, Shanks—it means whatever you read into it.”

Shanks stared at the ground, fidgeting. “It wasn’t the flowers; it was the caterpillars, but death came from every opening flower that spring.” His eyes went wide. “Death! Insane death!” Shanks chopped a hand toward a fallen tree. “Sit down. You’ll listen, won’t you? You’ll listen to me?”

Mike sat. Ian should catch up to him soon.

“It’s not my fault. There was a mutation, don’t you see? There had to be. We couldn’t find it and couldn’t fix it.” Shanks’s agitation seemed to recede a bit, his voice losing its edge.

“Maybe if you just tell me about when it started…”

Shanks sat down and said nothing.

Finally Mike said, over the sounds of the darkening forest, “You had a suicide epidemic?”

Shanks took a deep breath and nodded sharply, ripples running down his long hair.

“I didn’t know what was happening at first,” Shanks blurted. “People got itches and scratched themselves raw. Bhenaz and Nicci, two of our systems engineers, went crazy with body piercing—without anesthetic. Another couple hacked each other to death.

“President Tams didn’t want to spread panic so she put out the word that they’d apparently taken a marital dispute over the top. We put the bodies in bags in the food cooler. She quarantined the data—kept it on planet—didn’t want people to think she was responsible for a murder-suicide epidemic. I begged Tams to send the data out. I—I knew something was very wrong.”

“I’ll bet you did. What was wrong, Shanks?”

“No!” Shanks sprung up, hit a tree with his fist, and spun around waving his arms wildly. “I can’t—I tried—It’s not my fault!”

“Take it easy.” Where was Ian? Mike asked himself silently.

Shanks looked into the forest for a moment, then sat back down. “Bhenaz and Nicci told me—they said if it ever got out about how good this was, the whole human race would kill itself. They were nuts by that time, of course. But they had the codes. They inhibited the orbital systems so the AIs wouldn’t interfere, trashed the data, and then trashed themselves.”

“Go on.”

“Pretty soon I was the only sane one left. Ha! Their minds… they made play of it—re-created savage anachronisms; vivisection, human sacrifice, swordfights, gunfights, eating each other alive. Do you know what that’s like to watch when you can’t—do anything about it?”

Mike shook his head and suppressed an awful thought. No, he had thought it. He had wondered about what being eaten alive felt like and the idea had excited him. He needed help. Later. “You said the caterpillars then, not the flowers, were the vector?”

Shanks bobbed his head, and looked like he was going to cry. “We almost had it under control. Just keep away from the flowers. Then, then—the springtimers bloomed.”

“The what?”

“The adult form of the caterpillars. They’re based on a cicada—the seventeen-year locust of Earth. Mom and Dad designed them. They look like crickets except when they fly. Then they look like butterflies. We named them springtimers because of when they hatch, that’s when the really warm season sets in here, about now. They were hatching out of chrysalises by the thousands. This was their first appearance—it was supposed to be kind of a surprise for everyone. I was in on it with Dad and Mom.

“The Wendy flowers are named after Mom. Several insects attach chrysalises to them, including the springtimers. The imago—the adult springtimers—were plectoptera but had characteristics of the lepidoptera on Earth—a stable genetic chimera we made by loop splicing, mostly on the J-457 morphobehavioral set. You don’t know bug genes—I can tell by your face.”

Mike felt a momentary sense of disconnect, being lectured in esoteric entomology by someone that to all outer appearances was a wildly crazy naked person.

“The first time the imago came out, they started biting everyone, just like the caterpillars.”

“So everyone got it. Why were you spared? What made you immune to the insanity?”

“I don’t know!” He half rose, then sighed and sat down again. “Dena didn’t know either. We had… a thing, until this happened. Then, a few days after, I began hiding out in the forest. I watched them get ready to burn her alive. They were making a big ceremony of it. I tried to save her. They came after me and I started shooting. They laughed. I kept shooting and shooting. I couldn’t stop… When they were all down, Dena walked over to me—they hadn’t tied her up or anything. I should have known she didn’t want to be saved.”

Mike buried his hands in his face for a moment. He remembered taking his little sister on walks. He remembered her big brown eyes and trusting hugs. A bird chirped, and a gentle breeze brought the incongruous scent of plumeria. Dena had loved flowers.

Mike glared up at Shanks. “Go on.” Get the information, he told himself. Then kill the bastard.

Shanks looked as if he would cry. “She told me not to worry, kissed me, and while she kissed me she took my gun. Then she grinned at me and started walking backward. Back to the fire.

“I tried to come after her, but she shot at the ground in front of me. Then she threw the gun down and walked into the fire herself with her arms raised up like this.” Shanks lifted his arms, opened them as if in some kind of religious ecstasy, and shook. “Crazy! Everyone was crazy! I couldn’t fix it without her. It wasn’t my fault!” he sobbed, looking spent.

Mike thought about the fire, the beautiful fire. Sis, was it so good? So good that you would forgo everything else that might ever happen to you for that one ultimate experience? He imagined Dena saying, It was wonderful, Mike. It was OK. It was all I ever needed.

Time to make my move, Mike told himself. Easy does it, don’t do anything threatening. Lose Shanks and we lose our hope for a cure and a planet. “You look like you could use a shower and a good meal…”

Shanks jumped up in an agitated way, seeming to struggle with himself. “I’ve told you all I can!”

Not by a long shot, Mike thought. He struggled to keep his hands down. “Please take it easy, we…”

“No!” Shanks suddenly turned and headed for the brush before Mike could stop him.

Ian burst out of the trees. “Hold it!” he yelled, gun in his hand.

Shanks screamed and tried to find cover, but the brush in the forest wasn’t dense enough to cover him completely. Ian stood still and raised the gun steadily. He tracked for a moment, then Mike heard the electric snap of its discharge and the round flew to its target.

Shanks gasped, fell to his knees and, at last, began to weep with abandon.

“You all right, Mike?” Ian asked.

No, Mike was not all right, but he took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he said.

They made their way to Shanks, hoisted the now inert biologist on their shoulders, and carried him back to the settlement.

Mike went to the infirmary for an exam. He had it now himself, he was sure—another data point.

“Any luck?” he asked Nadine.

Nadine nodded. “The Cochran people checked out as much of Shanks’s story as they could. It’s accurate as far as it goes. Working back from the autopsies, I think I’ve found a retrovirus. I don’t know what it does yet, but there’s DNA in these people that doesn’t belong there and it matches some new DNA in me, too.”

“How does it spread?”

“Probably by anything that gets past the skin. A cough, a shared glass, sex. I’ll order increased hygiene and abstinence. We’ve all been exposed already, but it may take repeated exposures. I wonder how it starts if no one is infected to begin with—what’s the vector?”

Mike scratched his head. “People that get bitten by caterpillars get it.”

“If it’s a caterpillar virus, how can it affect people?” Nadine asked. “There are three of them in the data base, but none of them affects people, according to their description.”

“According to genetic design descriptions, the caterpillars don’t bite, either. What about mutations?”

“That’s two mutations, Mike, and each of them a hell of a mutation!” She pursed her lips. “Shanks might have made the caterpillars bite, and the virus may have mutated. Or the caterpillar virus may do nothing more dangerous than cause a wart—and then all the craziness is caused by something else.”

“He knows more than he’s told us. I’m sure of it. He might have made this retrovirus and shielded himself while it did its work. Is your virus in the springtimers?”

“How would I know that?” Nadine snapped. “I just found it in the human victims!”

“Sorry. Nadine…” He reached for her and she fell against him. She’d lost a lot of weight, he noticed, and felt as if she were made of paper. He held her for one minute, for two. “Just asking. We had the Yeager collect the one that bit me.”

“Then I’d better get back to work,” Nadine said and made a short, rueful laugh. “But, Mike?”

“Yes?”

“If I have to go, I’d rather it were fire than overwork.”

Mike put a hand on her shoulder and dug his nails in, just a bit.

She smiled, with the hint of a tear in her eye, then brushed his cheek with her lips.

Morning came early for Mike, long before Epsilon Eridani rose. Astronomer Kay Singh had found Sean Peterson, their ecologist. Singh had reacted coolly and quickly, calling Ian and Nadine. They and the robots got him into the autodoc still alive.

Mike saw the man in the infirmary and was headed back to the settlement when he ran into Ian. Ian was carrying a Wendy flower with a chrysalis.

“How?”

“He tore his flesh with a scrap of metal in a clearing out of sight of the overheads and then lay down where the crows would finish the job. It would have worked except that that was just the kind of place Kay likes to put her sky-scanners. He was still conscious; we had to trank him. He was quite put out with us, you know—begged us to leave him alone.”

Mike tried not to think about it, unsuccessfully. To surrender yourself, piece by piece. To savor each tear, each cut…

“Mike?”

“Ian, we all have it. It’s just a matter of time.”

Ian studied Mike for a moment, then cleared his throat. “Well. We put our hope in the medical staff, then, don’t we?”

A chill went through Mike. Of his ten people, Mike realized, two were already dead, one was badly injured, and at least two of the remainder were showing bad signs: Nadine and himself.

“At any rate,” Ian continued, “I will lay odds that this—” he pointed to the chrysalis, “—is a springtimer chrysalis, and not something else. So in a few days, I’ll wager the air will be full of what comes out of these things.”

“Isn’t it a little early? It’s only been fourteen standard years.”

“Bloody right, Mike, but that’s seventeen seasonal cycles here. The flowers are so pretty. Can hardly help but pick them, can you?—Get a little high out of it when the little bugger bites you, no? And each bite adds a little more of whatever it is—a bloody positive feedback loop.”

Mike looked at him. “You too?”

Ian looked grim, but said, simply, “You know, it’s curiously hard to admit, even after all that. Well. I’m handling it rather well so far, aren’t I?”

Mike nodded. “Let’s get some of these pupae back to Nadine. We need to find a cure for this.”

“While we still want to,” Ian remarked, softly. He looked away, toward the hills. “If we can’t find a cure, we just might still save the planet by getting rid of the bloody things, right?”

“Right,” Mike nodded. Even if it couldn’t do his crew any good now. “Yeager, what did they do about bugs before genetic engineering?”

“There are chemicals that are significantly more toxic to insects than other things. They will hurt the ecology generally, however.”

Rod can pick up the pieces, Mike thought. “Can you make them out of local materials?”

“Yes,” the shuttle’s system replied, “the air motiles could deliver the chemicals to the affected area as a fine mist in a couple of days.”

“Do it.”

“You think that’s the vector?” she said, looking at the pupae. “If so, we could take some of the flowers with attached chrysalises, put them in cold storage, and eradicate the others,” Nadine suggested.

Mike pursed his lips. “We could get out of here, put ourselves in cold sleep, and let the people with the big facilities work the problem and cure us when we wake up.”

Nadine shook her head. “It’s not that simple. We don’t know that the virus in the caterpillars is what does it, or that eradicating it solves the problem. All we’ve got so far is correlation—not proof of cause and effect. We agreed this job was worth doing, worth the risk. Let’s finish it.”

“At the cost of how many more lives?”

One look at her face told him that remark was a mistake. “Sorry,” he said. “Look, one more day. Demonstrate causality if you can, and I’ll try to get something more out of Shanks. Then, if we don’t have a clear path out of this, we get out, OK?”

“I guess,” Nadine conceded.

“Nadine, we’ve had two violent suicides and a third attempt. Half of us are quietly hurting ourselves one way or another and fantasizing about volunteering for the inquisition. We need a cure.”

“Mike… Shanks could be innocent, you know?”

“How? Didn’t he hide for weeks and then try to run when I pressed him? He’s guilty as sin!”

“That could be a natural reaction to being alone for years. And he must have known he’d look guilty. Let’s assume his story is valid for a moment, that it is a mutation. Shanks could just happen to be immune. That’s the nature of human biology: no matter how virulent a substance is to the human body, you’ll always find someone who can take it.”

“That’s too broad for me,” Mike said. “Enough cyanide will kill anyone.”

“ ‘Enough,’ Mike, is the operative word. When it comes to germs, viruses, venom—the level of tolerance can differ dramatically from person to person.”

“In theory, sure. But to believe Shanks happened to be immune out of such a small group of colonists is stretching things. And why didn’t he save a specimen of an imago? He’s a trained biologist. You’d imagine he’d think of that.”

Nadine shrugged. “So we go back to Shanks as a psychopath. Get the psych program to evaluate his sanity—which I would suspect isn’t too good after all those years alone on this planet.” Nadine turned to him from her tiny desk in the Yeager. “I think the effect of the virus is at least partly psychological, too: Skinnerian.”

“Who?”

“B.F. Skinner—a twentieth-century behavioralist. He claimed you could be conditioned to do almost anything with a suitable set of rewards. I think that’s how the virus works—it makes our bodies reward physical trauma with endorphins.” She shrugged. “Maybe there needs to be a place like this, for when people get tired of living forever. It might not be that bad a way to go, would it? I mean we all go sometime, and why not make a joyfully messy splash of it on our own terms, rather than waiting for a rocket engine to fail, or a meteor to come along some year?”

Mike looked at her sharply, but she seemed under control. “I guess,” he said, with forced casualness. “Nadine, I’d hate to see Dena’s whole world marked ‘off limits’ and wasted for decades because we can’t nail down one retrovirus. Can we build a countervirus based on what you have now?”

“Difficult, Mike. That’s very difficult. Even with three of us and all the Cochran’s brains working on it, it’s going to be hard to find; and I can tell you right now, Dr. Bailey doesn’t want anything physical coming from us up to orbit.”

Mike stared at her and laughed ironically. “What’s he afraid of? It feels so great to stick yourself.”

She grabbed his left arm and exposed the underside where he had been sticking pins in it. “I’m going to put everyone on naloxone—it’s an endorphin antagonist, blocks the receptor sites. Trouble is, this will take the edge off everything, and make us more irritable, and vulnerable to depression. You can’t do just one thing. I don’t dare give you too much. Sorry, Mike.”

“No argument. Just don’t make a zombie out of me. And get everyone else in here, too. We don’t want any more of that,” he jerked a thumb toward the auto doc and what was left of the barely living Peterson. “Suppose Shanks did it. He’d know how to undo it, wouldn’t he?”

Nadine shook her head. “I would guess that he wouldn’t, or he would have done so. I would guess that he blundered and doesn’t really know how to undo it, or he would have fourteen years ago. But we could—I think—if he could tell us what to look for among those billions and billions of base pairs.”

Mike stood. “Let’s call it a night, Nadine.”

“That quote about the flowers…”

“What about it?” he asked.

“Is it the ravings of a madman—or a biological saboteur trying to appear like one?”

That night, in his settlement room, Mike reviewed everything their library had on the original survey team. He skimmed tens of thousands of kilobytes of technical data on Shanks and his parents, looking for something.

Carl Shanks, his wife Wendy, and their son Ken had spent an entire year fabricating the Griffith’s World genomes. Carl Shanks kept a personal diary which became an addendum to the team’s official report. Mike read the entire file. Everything seemed normal—no difficulties, no reservations.

Something was missing, he knew. Something right in front of his nose. What kind of mutation? No! The genomes matched the design—there was no mutation, at least not since the final genome was recorded. So it happened before the final genomes were recorded. Shanks had had access.

In a minute, Mike was out his door and down the hall to Shanks room. He overrode the entry control and barged in without warning. Shanks was watching his wall screen.

“Shanks! We need to know what you did with the springtimers, how you did it, and when. I’ll need to record this.”

Shanks froze, and continued to look at the wall. “It wasn’t my fault,” he said. “Mom and Dad did the springtimers. I was just a kid, then.”

Mike tried again. “We tested the pupa. There’s a retrovirus—”

“I’m accidentally immune!” Shanks insisted.

“You ran.”

“You were carrying guns! I thought no one’s going to believe me after all of this: they’ll want revenge! They’ll want to kill me for this. I guess I knew I’d look like a murderer or worse. I was scared, damn near par—par—”

“—Paranoid.” Mike supplied the word. Ironically, the last time he’d heard it was from Nadine, applied, loosely, he hoped, to himself. If your fears come true, he wondered, are you suddenly not paranoid?

“I hadn’t,” Shanks continued, “interacted with a human being for fourteen years. I was—just out of practice, afraid. So I left notes, what I thought were clues, and ran. It seems nuts, but I wasn’t thinking well.”

Mike nodded, anger fading. Let him talk, Mike thought. Maybe he’d work his way into something. “What kept you going all these years if you didn’t expect any rescue?”

For a moment, Shanks acted as if he didn’t understand the question. Then he looked into the middle distance. “Instinct, I think. It’s damn hard to die, unless, inside, you really want to. You keep solving problems, keep eating, keep drinking, keep breathing. You can always die tomorrow.”

“Why didn’t you save any adult springtimers? Weren’t you curious? Didn’t you expect questions if rescue came?”

“They only live a few weeks. Everything was going crazy and I just didn’t think…” Shanks cradled his head in his hands. “My lab was useless without power. Anyway, I was the insect expert. Dena had a better handle on human biology. I never thought anyone would come for me. I lived day-to-day.”

“But you saved the bodies. Bagged and buried.”

He nodded. “The colony fell apart without the robots—no refrigeration—so underground was the best place for them. Cool, thermally stable. I couldn’t get a message out and I didn’t want it to happen again to anyone else. I couldn’t fix it, but maybe someone who came later could. At least you’d know what happened. Was Mom still alive when you left Tau Ceti?”

Mike was taken aback for a moment, but he’d spent a good part of the night reviewing the records. “She’s teaching at Alexigrad University, on South Continent.” We should have brought her, Mike thought; hindsight was perfect. “That quote from Isaac Watts? Why’d she teach it to you?”

Shanks shrugged. “It’s from ‘Against Idleness.’ She said I should use it on Dad the next time he accused me of being too lazy to finish my own work. One bee, lots of flowers.”

Mike thought that one over for a minute, trying to fit it in with the diary he’d spent the night reading. “Weren’t you sick once? Your dad mentioned it in the diary; he thought you were malingering.”

“That was when my mother taught me the quote… I was in bed and had time to read.” Shanks’s eyes widened. “You see, I’d been transplanting some of her flowers from the forest when one of the caterpillars bit me. I had a reaction.”

“They aren’t supposed to bite, Shanks. Why do the caterpillars bite?”

He stared at the floor. Finally he said, “To protect the Wendy flowers.”

“Your parents didn’t do that, did they? If they had, it would have gone through the review process and been documented.”

He looked away for what seemed minutes, then sighed. “OK. Mom kept saying the flowers were so pretty they’d have to be protected, or people would pick them. So I took some genes from the collared peripatus and made a small modification. Just that and inactivating the code that keeps insects here from biting large animals. It bit, all right—I was down a few days. It was an idiosyncratic reaction, an accident, don’t you see? That’s all. I didn’t plan to be immune to a plague I didn’t make!”

Mike shook his head. “You were also a boy genius, and creative. It hurt you and you wanted to fix it, didn’t you? So you did something more.”

Shanks looked away.

“Please,” Mike pressed. “We need to know what you changed. There are lives at stake, which, if we were in our right minds, we would want to keep. Do you want to go through it all again? The blood? The graves? It wasn’t a mutation; it was something you engineered, wasn’t it? Before the genome was recorded. What? How?”

Shanks stared at the floor.

Mike tried again. “Nobody’s going to hurt you, Shanks; it’s gone well beyond anything that can be fixed by punishing you. Dena would forgive you, Shanks.” Like hell, he thought. But this wasn’t the time to stand on accuracy. “She was my sister, I knew her that well. Do it for her. Tell us.”

The revelation got Shanks to talk. “Your sister? God, I’m sorry.”

Mike waited.

Shanks’s eyes pleaded.

Mike stared.

Finally, Shanks said, “Yeah. I… made another little change—something to take the sting out of the bite. I found a virus in the insects’ saliva—normally, it doesn’t touch people. I changed its protein sheath to let it survive in human blood and made it soluble in lipids to get it past the blood-brain barrier—like it was food. That change didn’t show up until the second generation. It worked fine on my computer models, so I slipped the code into the gene design data base.

“The virus doesn’t lyse brain cells, but once in there it drops the code I made into the genes of brain cells it infects. Usually it does nothing, but in the back of the hypothalamus, it causes synapse growth between pain, smell, and endorphin cue areas, so that when something smells good, pain feels good.”

He shook his head and there were the beginnings of tears in his eyes. “It just releases a few endorphins if you get bit when picking a Wendy flower so the bite doesn’t hurt so much. It doesn’t block pain—you still feel it. You just interpret it differently.

“The adults aren’t supposed to bite. There must have been a mutation of one of the seed stock before we scanned the final genome. A very simple one—neoteny, the retention of some juvenile characteristics. In its descendants, the adults still bit people.”

A mutation? No, Mike thought, an error. He paused for a moment, struggling with memories of Dena. For her sake, he had to beat this. “Did you try to exterminate them?”

He sighed. “We were all bitten before we realized what was happening. People stopped trying. They became addicted, literally addicted, to damaging their bodies. So did the horses and the other large mammals. Commander Tanner, you know what was worst?”

Mike shook his head. What could possibly be worse?

“All this ecstasy around me. People transported in joy as they destroyed themselves. And I couldn’t be part of it, couldn’t feel it at all. I should have died, too, for what I did. But I couldn’t.” He half laughed and half sobbed. “I was immune.”

The frail, guilt-wracked survivor seemed more like a frightened man-child than a mass murderer. Mike thought of events of ages past—mass hysteria, witch burnings, cult suicides, thousands of people raising their arms and yelling, “Sieg heil,” people getting carried away with endorphin rewards when their minds knew better. How much, Mike wondered, was in Shanks’s retrovirus, and how much was already there?

“Shanks, we can’t bring back the dead, but maybe we can save our lives and this planet’s ecology so that it can still be settled. Help us.”

Mike waited the longest minute he’d ever waited in his life.

Then Shanks nodded slowly. “I’ll work with you—tell you everything I remember.” For Mike it seemed as if a veil had fallen away. Shanks’s inflection, indeed his whole attitude, seemed more adult.

“OK. I’m going to put you in touch with our medical people. They want to try to construct a countervirus.”

Mike decided to let Nadine sleep and got Dr. Bailey out of his orbital bed. The conversation was far too esoteric for Mike to follow, but it sounded like Shanks and Bailey might be able to trace the changes he’d made as a teenager over two dozen years ago. Despite the importance, Mike was suddenly too tired to pay attention. When they were done, he went back to his room and fell asleep instantly.

The call came while Mike was deep in dream. He was a Roman martyr being shot full of arrows while tied to a stake, freed from his flesh to ascend. He grew lighter and lighter, joy spreading through him…

“Commander, it’s Harrison. Mike, Mike?”

“Yes—Ian. What?”

“I’m at the pad. Mills sealed himself in on the command deck, disabled the shuttle’s computers, and says he’s going to fly it manually and crash into the settlement. Fry bloody everything and everyone if the antimatter containment goes. I’m trying overrides through the old colony launch support system, but they’re not compatible, so far. Or he’s blocked it somehow. Bloody out of his mind, he is.”

Damn, who wasn’t? Kendu Mills had shown no sign of any effect. But, Mike realized, it was just human nature to fight admitting that something like this was eating away inside you, even to yourself. “Tell him it isn’t necessary. We know what it is. We can fix it. Just hang on a few more hours.”

“He’s not bloody listening. Nadine is on board, too. Can’t reach her either. I’ve three colony vehicles here, and one functioning brain—trying to pull it from the grader and put it in the fire truck.”

“Copy. Ian, make sure Rod’s getting the data, but tell him to stay put. I don’t want him coming down. We don’t know if Nadine’s cure will work and I don’t want to risk breaking quarantine until I know it does. See if you can’t trigger some of the Yeager’s safety shutdown systems; they aren’t all tied to the main computer. Mills might not think of everything in his present state. Ian, be careful yourself. Think everything through, because this virus ruins your judgment. You can’t trust your feelings because your feelings will try to maneuver you into destroying yourself. Think it through!”

“Roger, Mike,” Ian said, coolly.

Do as I say, Mike thought. Not as I do.

Wearing only his shorts, Mike slipped the comm set in a pocket and was out the door and headed to the launch pad on a dead run, leaning low to the ground to keep from bouncing in the moderate gravity. Warm air, flowery smells, and the still plaintive notes of some night bird gave the evening a surreal voluptuousness.

Out of shape, his lungs started burning, and that felt good. Every stone and thorn in the path under his bare feet gave him a little high as well. But the desperate situation helped clear part of his mind. His mission was in jeopardy. He and everyone else might have only minutes to live—but the pleasure of abusing his body nearly overwhelmed him.

Then he was there. Ian, surrounded by various tracked vehicles, panels, and tools, had managed to get a spotlight on the shuttle. Steam was venting, signaling that its mass converters were already coming up to temperature. The warning tone sounded: full thrust was imminent.

“I’ll try to get inside!” Mike yelled, passing by Ian on a dead run and charged at the shuttle. His feet tore through, and were torn by, the overgrowth on the field.

He forced himself to think. There were at least three systems that would abort the launch if people were close. Mills couldn’t have gotten all of them. Not that it would really matter if he had. Mike had no more fear of flame.

The hatch above the landing leg ladder opened. That should shut it down, he thought, almost disappointed. Nadine appeared in the hatch, carrying her black case, five meters above the ground, and started down the ladder.

“I have the countervirus!” she yelled. “Bailey cracked it and I replicated it. It works!”

How could she be sure without trials? Mike wondered, briefly.

The turbine whine increased—no shutdown. So Mills had been insanely thorough. Bless him.

Too late, Mike thought; it would end here. His responsibilities would be over and he could give himself to the flame of the rockets and dissolve in sensual joy. No. Not alone. Not without Nadine.

“Jump,” he screamed at her. “Now!”

Nadine heard either him or the turbines and jumped the last five meters. Only two meters worth back at Tau Ceti III—survivable. She landed hard and rolled, then struggled to her feet and limped toward him through the vines and grass, clutching the bag to her chest, sheltering it with her body.

His legs were cramping from almost a kilometer of dead run. Thrills of pain ran through his legs. He was probably tearing things. It felt great, but he was slowing down. If he could only get to her, they could go together—no, save the countervirus. One of them might make it back.

She limped toward him.

“Get down!” he tried to yell. It came out like a croak from his air-starved lungs.

Five pillars of steam appeared below the shuttle and a deafening blast of sound hit him. The pressure wave struck and Nadine leaped, or was thrown, the last meter right at him. He pulled Nadine down into the blast shadow outside the rim of the shuttle’s landing crater as the engine noise built to a deafening roar.

She screamed as an ecstatic wave of fire passed over them. He wanted the fire, but her body was in the way. He rolled her under him. The sample case fell to the ground within his arm’s reach.

Why was she screaming? The fire was wonderful. It felt good… too good. The last vestiges of his suspicion, skepticism, and paranoia surfaced in his mind. Too good to be true. He reached for the sample case and pulled it under them as the fiery blast passed over them in earnest. To give others a chance, he thought, just in case this wasn’t the way to paradise.

A torrent of cold water hit them, first stinging, then numbing as the roar of the shuttle increased to incredible, then diminished as it gained altitude.

Ian, somehow, had put a fire hose on them. He didn’t understand either! Mike caught a glimpse of Ian, at the pad’s edge, in the open cab of the fire truck, aiming the hose manually. He seemed on fire. No, perhaps Ian did understand.

Mike, bemused to be still alive, noted the contrast between the delightfully sharp cold water on one side and the equally sensual burning on the other. He knew he was a mess, but this had felt much, much better than sex had ever been. Nadine’s face was a mask of intense emotion, but otherwise intact.

“Murphy’s law,” she gasped.

“Huh?” He stared at her dumbly. If only Ian would turn off the damn water. It was starting to numb him and he wanted more stimulation, he wanted to be consumed, he was delirious.

“I dreamed about getting burned alive for weeks.” Nadine gasped. “But I took the countervirus to see if it works. It works, goddamn it. Mike, this hurts, God it hurts.” Her eyes glazed over; she’d lost consciousness.

“Nadine?” He felt an awful chill of sadness in the midst of his ecstasy. He had wanted to share.

A scream above announced the Yeager’s suicidal dive on the settlement. So it would be over for everyone as well. Pull up! he willed. No problem though; the blast would be the peak experience for which all life was made. There was nothing anyone could do with the rest of their lives that would equal this. No!

But the shuttle’s dive changed pitch. He looked up, surprised to be still conscious, in a kind of blowsy afterglow, with the cold water numbing his body, though even the shivers were pleasant. The shuttle had pulled up for some reason.

Curious. Had Mills changed his mind? There it was, carefully, hesitatingly moving sideways on its tail to the far end of the pad. Landing.

There was another roar in the sky.

Rod, damn him. Rod had disobeyed his orders, broken the quarantine, and come down in another shuttle. They must have taken control of the Yeager through some data link that Mills hadn’t cut.

Commander’s priority override, he remembered. Rod had assumed command. So Mills hadn’t thought of everything. He felt the sample case under him. Not necessary, after all. Rod would have more. The colony was probably saved.

But he just wanted more fire. Why didn’t Ian turn that damn hose off?

Mike was there when Nadine emerged from the Eisenhower’s autodoc. It had her up to normal weight, and Mike, who had emerged from the Yeager’s autodoc three days earlier, felt the effect was spectacular. But the effects of the rocket blast were not entirely gone; her skin was a patchwork of tan and soft pink, and her hair was a golden fuzz. He whistled, and handed her coveralls to her.

“OK on the outside. But, that was close, lover. Damn close. I feel a million years old inside.” She gave him a brief hug, stepped into the one-piece garment, wiggled her feet into its boots, and touched the seals. “You look a little different yourself.”

He smiled crookedly—he’d seen the video of what he looked like when he went in—then saddened. “Ian didn’t make it. I thought I should tell you first.”

She looked down for a moment, then nodded. “What’s going to happen now?” she asked.

“We’ll have a memorial service. I’m leaving Shanks here to work on undoing the damage he did.”

“Alone?” She started down the ladder.

“Not quite.” Mike followed. “Kay Singh is going to stay, too.”

“With Shanks?”

“Yes. I’d probably stay in orbit—I’m not that trusting, myself.”

“Thank goodness,” she said. “If you hadn’t been so paranoid about Shanks, we’d be…” She shivered momentarily. “Some people might want to get their hands on Shanks.”

Mike shrugged. “I suppose another fourteen years of exile in a jungle with that—” he waved a hand toward the colony and Boot Hill, “—on his conscience for the rest of his life might do for punishment.”

“It might.” Nadine sighed. “Well, we did it.”

Mike nodded. He felt curiously empty—the mission was done, the problem solved. “But we paid for it… I hope it was worth it.”

“Mike, I think historians would say this kind of thing is part of the price we pay for not staying home. To those who pay the price, goes the glory. Let’s not demean it with cynicism.”

He looked at her. She was serious—and, he realized, right. He nodded. Then they passed through the lock and waved to the crew below.

The crew of the shuttle Eisenhower; and the other surviving crew members of the Yeager, met them at the base of the shuttle’s leg. An eternity of two weeks ago, Ian had rigged the colony replicator to produce what he called Scotch “fit for The Bishop’s Table.” Now, they found glasses of the amber liquid pressed into their hands as soon as they reached the ground. Mike sniffed it suspiciously, took a tentative sip, nodded, then raised his glass. “To all the people who became part of this world in the struggle to make and keep it.”

“To Dena,” Nadine whispered. Mike gave her a small, sad grin.

People cheered and touched glasses. Beyond them, Wendy flowers peaked through scorched earth and waved seductively in the wind.

Rest easy, Sis, Ian, Mike thought. We’ll finish the job.